There are about 100 days left in 2026. That number is 29.3% of the whole year, and I’m not giving up a single day of it.
In last week’s FOMC meeting, the Fed raised the federal rate a quarter point, the first rate hike in three years, a decision the CME Group had anticipated with a 94% chance last Tuesday
The next three and a half months are not a period to coast through. If a few of the signals stacking up right now turn out to be real, this fall is going to test agents who haven’t built the right habits.
The agents who lean in are going to walk away with the market share that the agents who check out this quarter are giving up.
So let’s get into it. Here’s where your time needs to go for the rest of 2026, and where it doesn’t.
The 90% Bucket Is Bottom of the Funnel
I’ve said this to our team a hundred times this year, and I’ll say it again here. Ninety percent of your working hours, for the rest of the year, belong in two places.
- Buy-side deals that are 30, 60, or 90 days from closing.
- Sellers who are genuinely willing to come down on price in this market.
Those are your base hit deals. They’re not glamorous, and they’re not the deal you’ll brag about at a broker meeting. They’re the deals that close in a difficult market, and closing is the whole game right now.
The 10% Bucket is for Everything Else
The other 10% of your time is for everything else, and I mean everything else. That includes the geo farm mail campaign you’ve been wanting to launch, the kind that won’t break even for 18 to 24 months. It also includes the trophy deal, the big one you’ve been chasing for three months straight while it eats 30, 40, even 50 percent of your calendar.
I’m not telling agents to abandon those plays forever. If you’ve got a savings runway and the next three and a half months don’t decide whether you pay your bills, go build for 2027 or 2028. Spend your time there.
But if income over the next 90 days is the priority, that geo farm campaign has to shrink down to 10% of your week, no more.
Here’s the chart I shared during the BAMx roleplay mastermind to show the 90/10 split.
Why This Particular Quarter Carries More Risk
I want to be clear here, because I don’t want anyone reading this to think I’m predicting a crash. I’m not. The sky isn’t falling. But there’s a stack of signals right now that deserves your attention, and ignoring them isn’t a strategy.
- The Fed raised the federal rate on September 16, the first move in three years, a decision prediction markets had priced at close to a 90% chance heading in.
- The 10 year yield hit its highest point since 2007 the week before the decision.
- Energy prices are climbing.
- The broader economy shows signs of slowing.
None of these signals alone would worry me. Stacked together, heading into a seasonally slower stretch of the year, they add up to a fall that could bring more volatility than we’ve seen in the last 12 to 18 months.
That’s the entire reason the 90/10 rule matters right now more than it did in June.
What Leaning In Looks Like Day to Day
I want to bring up an agent who joined our team recently as an example. Doug has five deals under contract in a short window, in a market every one of us agrees is hard.
Our sales director has been talking with Doug about what changed for him, and he paraphrased Doug’s answer this way:
“You show up to the 9 a.m. trainings. You show up to the 11 a.m. trainings, you listen to Emily, you listen to Byron, you listen to me, and you just lean into it.”
No secret system, no shortcut. According to our sales direction, Doug attends the training sessions and applies what gets covered instead of treating them as optional.
Doug’s schedule backs that up. Here’s roughly how his day breaks down.
- Half the day goes to prospecting calls, half goes to appointments.
- If he hits a wall by early afternoon, he takes a break, then picks calls back up from 4 to 6 p.m., the window research consistently points to as the strongest time to reach people.
- He calls people. He doesn’t text or email the details that decide a transaction.
Our team’s development trainer has watched the phone-first habit pay off firsthand.
“Doug is an excellent communicator with listing agents, with his buyers. He is talking on the phone all the time and that is huge. And so he’s giving people confidence in him…and he’s making people feel comfortable with him. And that’s a huge thing so that they know, like and trust him and the other agents want to work with him.”
100 Days Left in 2026
Imagine quitting 30% early on a race. Imagine cutting your time with your kid short by 30% and calling it good enough. Nobody does that on purpose, yet agents do it with their year, every single fall. And then they wonder why January feels so hard.
We’ve sold through 7% rates multiple times over the past four years of this real estate recession. This market hasn’t beaten us yet, and I don’t plan on letting it start now.
There’s real opportunity sitting in front of every agent reading this right now, and real market share available to whoever picks it up.
You do that by:
- Putting 90% of your time into the buyers and sellers ready to move this quarter.
- Saving the other 10% for the long game.
- Picking up the phone every day.
Do that for the next 100 days, and you’ll walk into 2027 from a position most of your competition gave up on in September.
